Agency & Autonomy
Locus of control, learned helplessness, self-determination — the experience of being the author.
32 entries
All behaviors in Agency & Autonomy
Agency
The felt capacity to act causally on your own life — to notice that something is asked of you, to choose a response, and to register that the response was yours.
Authorship Crisis
The felt rupture that arrives when the borrowed frames you have been wearing as your own stop holding the life — when conviction thins, the script no longer reads, and the question of who has been writing surfaces with nowhere to file it.
Authorship Reclamation
The act of repatriating your own narrative — taking back the pen from the inherited voices, undelivered verdicts, and borrowed scripts that have been writing in your name, and beginning, sentence by sentence, to author from the seat.
Autonomy
The felt right to set the direction of your own life — to be the one who decides what counts as good, what counts as enough, and what counts as yours.
Counter-Dependent Autonomy
Autonomy organised around the refusal of dependence — a self that proves it does not need anyone by structuring its life so that no one is structurally needed.
Decision Authority
The felt seat inside a decision from which the final ranking is issued — the position that says, after all inputs are weighed, which option actually counts as the one chosen.
Decision Self-Trust
The felt sense that your own choices are trustworthy to you — that the move you made was the one you would make again if the same moment returned.
Disempowerment
The structural or relational removal of your felt-power — the slow leakage of the seat over years inside a system, role, or relationship that quietly conditions you to act through them rather than from yourself.
External Locus of Control
The felt orientation that outcomes in one's life are mainly answerable to forces outside oneself — useful when calibrated to genuinely uncontrollable contingency, costly when it abdicates moves the body could still make.
Help-Resistant Autonomy
The reflex refusal of aid even when aid is needed and freely offered — autonomy guarded so tightly that letting help in feels like letting selfhood out.
Hyper-Independence
Chronic over-functioning alone — usually trauma-rooted — in which the body absorbs every load by default because depending on others was once unsafe and the system never updated.
Inner Authority
The felt right to rule on what is true, good, and worth doing for you — the internal seat from which the final verdict on your own life is issued.
Inner Permission
The felt right to do, feel, want, or be — the internal clearance that lets a life act on its own behalf without first waiting for an external go-ahead that was never going to arrive.
Internal Locus of Control
The felt orientation that outcomes in one's life are mainly answerable to one's own effort, choice, and character — high-density when calibrated to actual contingency, costly when it slips into over-attribution and self-blame.
Learned Helplessness
The trained inner posture that effort will not move the line — a body that has learned to stop trying in advance, because trying has been answered too many times by no response, no result, or no change.
Learned Hopefulness
The slow rebuilding of the contingency model after it has been severed — a body relearning, through small completed acts, that effort and outcome can still be connected in particular places at particular times.
Learned Optimism
The trained habit of explaining setbacks in ways that preserve agency — high-density when the explanations are honest, low-density when the same language is used to mask costs the body is still paying.
Locus of Control
The felt orientation that decides, before any single act, whether outcomes in your life are mainly answerable to you or mainly answerable to forces around you — the seat from which causation appears to issue.
Personal Power
The felt capacity to make effects in the world that the world registers as yours — not domination, not authority, not status, but the embodied sense that what you do moves the line and that the move was made from inside the seat.
Powerlessness
The chronic felt-sense that you cannot make effects in the world that the world will register — a settled background reading of the self as causally thin, often arrived at by collapsing pre-emptively rather than by failing to act.
Pseudo-Autonomy
The polished performance of self-direction — a life that looks autonomously chosen from the outside and from the inside, but whose direction was never claimed from the seat that would make it actually yours.
Reactive Autonomy
Autonomy whose direction comes from refusal — a self defined by what it says no to, which mistakes the discharge of resistance for the act of choosing.
Reempowerment
The slow, embodied rebuilding of felt-power after disempowerment or chronic powerlessness — a return to the seat made through small acts repeatedly registered as yours, until the body once again carries a recent reference for being causally real.
Self-Authorship
The felt capacity to be the one who writes the meaning of your life — to hold the frames you live inside as yours, chosen and revisable, rather than as inherited rooms you happen to wake up in each morning.
Self-Betrayal
Choosing against your own named direction in a specific moment — small enough that the act looks reasonable, large enough that the body logs it as a violation.
Self-Determination
The felt experience of moving from inside one's own life — the body registering that what is being done meets a need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness rather than merely satisfying the language of choosing.
Self-Honoring
Treating your own signals — needs, limits, preferences, tirednesses, quiet pulls — as load-bearing data rather than nuisance to be managed around.
Self-Loyalty
A sustained internal allegiance to your own named direction — held steady across moods, pressures, and relationships, and felt afterwards as a kind of inward straightness.
Self-Permission Block
The chronic, often unconscious withholding of inner permission from yourself — a standing veto issued from a hidden seat that keeps the life small without ever quite refusing it.
Self-Sovereignty
The felt jurisdiction over your own life — the quiet, load-bearing sense that the final word on what you do, who you are, and what counts as good for you rests inside you.
Self-Trust Erosion
The slow loss of decision self-trust after a string of small self-betrayals — the body learning, episode by episode, that its own promises do not arrive.
Surrender of Authority
The handing over of decision authority to another person, group, or doctrine — a transfer of the seat that converts your life into someone else's call, often with the language of trust or humility.